Double Fine will be able to finish it without crunch, which is nice.
Over the break, Double Fine reported on the condition of the studio’s present undertaking, Psychonauts 2, as a nine-minute video facilitated by Tim Schafer. Wearing a Christmas sweater with the Double Fine’s two-headed infant on it, he happily clarifies that “all the levels are in the game,” and when the engineers return from their break, they’ll be completing and cleaning it.
As the video depiction says, “2020 was a darn abnormal time however Psychonauts 2 is progressing nicely and will deliver one year from now.” Twofold Fine’s working cycle has changed, as this update shows.
The studio focused on making Psychonauts 2 without crunch, and as Schafer says, “On the main game that was one of the most exceedingly awful crunch modes we’ve ever done.” The other change is that everybody’s telecommuting, and a large part of the video is a film taken from their Zoom calls, which implies you will see which staff individuals use foundations. (Schafer’s is the “all work and no play makes Jack a dull kid” scene from The Shining.)
Double Fine appears to have made the best of work-from-home, and Schafer has become something of an “inner game decoration”, playing each form while different individuals from the group watch and remark so the entire thing can be recorded for later investigation. Y
You can see him bouncing around different pieces of Psychonauts 2 as the designers choose to cut a cable car from a part or fix an issue with eyeballs disconnecting from the tops of some skeleton individuals.
Just as returning to the finished levels, they’ll obviously be dealing with the cutscenes, end credits, front-end menu, and a post-game epilog that will allow you to investigate the world subsequent to finishing the story—something the first Psychonauts didn’t have.
While there’s still a way to go, Psychonauts 2 seems to be on track to be released this year.
